Literature: Year In Review 2000 | Britannica.com Literature: Year In Review 2000 Written By: Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content. Overview Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent The brightest literary star of the year 2000 came out of South America, but flashes of incandescent brilliance appeared in other areas of the world as well. With La fiesta del chivo, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru produced what many readers considered Latin America’s finest novel ever. Interweaving three separate narratives in a series of alternating chapters, Vargas Llosa chronicled the 31-year reign and ultimate demise of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo and evoked the chaos and confusion that followed Trujillo’s 1961 assassination. Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott of St. Lucia also took up a Caribbean theme in his book-length poem Tiepolo’s Hound. Walcott examined his own life and that of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro.

The volume’s dual narrative highlighted their shared experiences of exile and artistic achievement as well as the cultural influences of Europe and the West Indies, which created a certain division in each of them. Russian author Viktor Pelevin (see Biographies) led a banner year in Eastern European fiction with his wildly imaginative novel Buddha’s Little Finger, a hallucinatory recasting of the life of the legendary Bolshevik commander Vasily Chapayev as told by a time-traveling asylum inmate. Acclaimed Hungarian author György (“George”) Konrád brought out Stonedial, a striking work that combined elements of the intellectual teaser and whodunit with the more expansive tapestry of a historical novel covering the years from World War II through the early 1990s. Chinese novelist Mo Yan—famed for the scathing satire and historical sweep of such works as Red Sorghum (1993) and The Garlic Ballads (1995)—produced an even more stunning novel, the savage and hallucinatory farce The Republic of Wine.

Following alarming reports of widespread corruption and infanticidal cannibalism in the province of Liquorland, Communist Party officials dispatch a special investigator to the scene, but he himself soon falls prey to debauchery and mental breakdown and fails to survive the province’s insidiously pervasive (and wildly funny) destructive tendencies. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Sri Lankan-born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje published Anil’s Ghost, a superb novel set in his native country during its vicious mid-1980s civil war. Though the politically tinged murder mystery that dominates the main plotline is never fully resolved, the novel succeeds beautifully in all other aspects. In the gripping novel In Search of Walid Masoud, Arab author Jabra Ibrahim Jabra tracked the disappearance of a Palestinian intellectual who had been a member of an organization engaged in the armed struggle against Israel. The author artfully used a lengthy but disconnected tape recording of jumbled utterances to compose a series of revealing monologues that together produced a penetrating study of both individual and national character. English United Kingdom. Although many critics complained that 2000 was a thin year for fiction, a number of literary debuts showed promise.

The most remarkable one was that of Zadie Smith, whose White Teeth was a panoramic and germane tale addressing issues of ethnic and cultural hybridity in northwestern London. The novel, which sold robustly, was penned by Smith while she was a student at the University of Cambridge and was greeted enthusiastically for its ambitious scope and confident characterizations. Another promising newcomer was Jason Cowley. He was hyped on the cover of his Unknown Pleasures as a “cool, edgy new voice,” but The Literary Review, though praising his book for its feverish readability, found his style more old-fashioned, with “more than a hint” of Graham Greene. Meanwhile Kristin Kenway’s Precious Thing, an acerbic tale of a disillusioned anarchist in search of love, was compared to Martin Amis’s debut novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Among the most praised fictional titles of the year were two collections of short stories. Equal Love by Peter Ho Davies was hailed as a “feat of ventriloquism.” Though the stories’ themes were unexceptional (a funeral, a hospital visit, or marital problems), they were infused with a graceful quirkiness that lifted them above the mundane.

The nine stories in Anita Desai’s Diamond Dust constituted an unsentimental examination of overlapping cultures; in one of the most striking, “Winterscape,” two old Indian widows visiting Canada see snow for the first time. Another novel singled out for particular praise was John Banville’s Eclipse, a story about an actor whose career ends when he dies on stage; it was greeted by The Guardian newspaper as a “spectacularly beautiful . . . work of art.” Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies Other offerings from more established fiction writers were met with varying levels of enthusiasm. Will Self’s third novel, How the Dead Live—about the death of a middle-aged woman from cancer—showed more humanity than his glitteringly clever earlier books, but some critics found it, like many other novels of the year, too long at 404 pages. Michèle Roberts’s The Looking Glass, an exuberant tale of an orphan’s way through the world, examined the complexity of feminine needs and projected desires.

Doris Lessing, entering her ninth decade, delivered Ben, in the World—a sequel to her best-selling The Fifth Child, published 12 years earlier—but most agreed that it failed to match the forcefulness of its predecessor. American Football: Fact or Fiction? Besides the aforementioned, other Booker Prize hopefuls included Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, and Fay Weldon, but they were passed over in favour of four somewhat obscure authors. Three of those four short-listed had together sold only 553 copies of their works. Only Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood were instantly recognizable. The Observer newspaper noted that all the selections had strong narratives and predicted that the millennial shortlist would prove a turning point away from the more innovatory offerings of past years. Nevertheless, the clear favourite—the bookmakers put it as an odds-on winner at two-to-one—was The Blind Assassin by Atwood, the doyenne of Canadian fiction. A structurally baroque account of an elderly woman looking back on her life and her relationship with a long-dead novelist sister, the book welded together themes of rivalry, female fulfillment, politics, and history.

Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans—a detective story set in 1930s England, where the sleuth investigated the disappearance of his own parents—was the second odds-on favourite. Critics found in these pages the assurance displayed in Ishiguro’s earlier winner, The Remains of the Day (1989). Though the lesser-known works were ranked as outsiders, many fancied The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi. The only debut novel on the shortlist, it was narrated by a gambler’s daughter from the Maltese community living in the Welsh town of Cardiff in the 1960s. Michael Collins, at 36, was the youngest writer represented. His third novel, The Keepers of Truth, was a story about a burnt-out local reporter in the U.S. Midwest. Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers, a historical novel about a 19th-century voyage to Tasmania, was given only a six-to-one chance, while Brian O’Doherty’s The Deposition of Father McGreevy (1999) was judged the least likely to win.

The latter was a tale of rural Ireland narrated by a defrocked priest. Trending Topics Eyjafjallajökull volcano Atwood, who had been short-listed three times earlier (The Handmaid’s Tale [1985], Cat’s Eye [1988], and Alias Grace [1996]), was victorious. Simon Jenkins, the chairman of the judges, declared that the panel had agreed that her book was “far reaching, dramatic and structurally superb,” demonstrating Atwood’s “poet’s eye for both telling detail and psychological truth.” The winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, awarded annually to a woman novelist, was Linda Grant for her When I Lived in Modern Times. The work told of a Soho hairdresser who travels to 1940s Palestine to become a citizen of the new country of Israel at its formation. Soon after she was announced as the unanimous choice of the judges, she faced accusations of plagiarism. A.J. Sherman claimed that she had overly relied on his academic study Mandate Days (1997) for her period detail and for certain passages.

Although Sherman dismissed the allegations, Grant and her publisher, Granta Books, agreed to acknowledge his book in future editions. The world’s richest literary prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth £Ir 100,000 (about $120,000), went to Nicola Barker, the 34-year-old author of Wide Open (1998). This novel dealt with a group of mismatched individuals struggling to live on a remote island amid a backdrop of startlingly funny Magic Realism. The judges praised the book’s “razor-sharp comic sensibility and flawless structure.” The Carnegie Medal, a major award for a children’s or young-adult book, went to Aidan Chambers for Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999). Owing to the frank treatment of such themes as adultery, homosexuality, and euthanasia, the choice surprised some. The author, a 65-year-old former monk, defended his outspokenness: “At 15 people . . . are very interested in thinking about important questions for the first time. . . .

I refuse to sell young people short by compromising on language or subject matter.” The other children’s author to capture headlines was J.K. Rowling. Her Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth in the blockbuster series, appeared amid a frenzy of advance publicity and anticipation. Its publisher, Bloomsbury, arranged a special tour for Rowling upon a steam-engine train dubbed “Hogwarts Express,” the name of the magic train in the story. Despite her phenomenal commercial success, the author narrowly missed winning the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999). The judges were reportedly divided between Rowling and poet Seamus Heaney, whose translation and adaptation of the Old English epic Beowulf (1999) had been rapturously received by the critics. One of the judges, biographer Anthony Holden, commented, “Potter is charming, but I think it’s derivative, traditional and not particularly well-written, and to compare it to Heaney is absurd.” Another judge, writer Robert Harris, countered that it was time to close the gap between the “arbiters of literary taste” and the reading public.

After a 5-to-4 vote, the award, worth £21,000 (about $34,000), went to Heaney. Former model Jerry Hall, whose appointment as a judge had been interpreted as a gesture toward acknowledging popular taste, voted with the Heaney faction. Martin Amis (see Biographies) released one of the most discussed nonfiction titles, his long-anticipated memoir, Experience. It was praised as both “entertaining” and “profound.” There were accusations, however, that Amis had affected to be closer than in fact he was to his cousin Lucy Partington, who had been famously kidnapped and murdered in 1973. Nevertheless, the book was deemed a success both as an autobiography and as a depiction of Amis’s close relationship with his late father, novelist Kingsley Amis. Another major autobiography was Max Hastings’s Going to the Wars, a portrait of decades of war reporting in Northern Ireland, Biafra, Indochina, Jordan, and the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). Anecdotal rather than analytic, it was praised for casting some fresh light on how modern-day wars had been fought.

World War II continued to provide fodder for more scholarly questioning. Eric A. Johnson’s massive Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (1999) reappraised the extent to which “ordinary Germans” could be held jointly responsible for the genocide of Jews in the Nazi camps. He concluded that most citizens were not as terrorized by the Gestapo as had been assumed and could have known what was really happening to those transported to the camps; on the other hand, he warned that their culpability and lack of moral concern might be found in any society where there was deeply embedded hostility “to those perceived as outsiders.” William Shawcross, meanwhile, questioned whether the United Nations had the ability to prevent such atrocities in the future. His Deliver Us from Evil: Warlords & Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict concluded that the mushrooming of horrific local wars, refugees, and mass killings would be addressed effectively only if the UN’s Charter could be fully realized.

History was a recurring theme of the year, dominated by Simon Schama’s epic A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World?: 3000 BC–AD 1603, the first of two volumes accompanying a highly successful BBC documentary series and described as “magnificent” by The Guardian. Philip Wilkinson’s What Did the Romans Do for Us? was published to complement another BBC documentary series and discussed the legacy (including bridges, roads, decorative arts, and cuisine) of the 400-year Roman occupation of Great Britain. Another major best-seller was the paperback edition of The Isles: A History by Norman Davies. It challenged the anglocentricity of other such histories and stressed the importance of the influence of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland on the British Isles as a whole. The Times (London) hailed it as a masterwork, declaring it a “tract for the times.” Also noteworthy was Piers Brendon’s 880-page narrative, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s. Its main theme was the role of propaganda and falsehood in a European society still dominated by class. A refreshing historical analysis came from The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought.

Edited by Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield, this collection of scholarly and eloquent essays probed how the ancients viewed and ran their societies and how their ideals of loyalty to the state and security evolved along with their development of differing kinds of constitutions. Among the biographies was a scrupulously researched account by Claire Harman of Fanny Burney, the novelist whom Virginia Woolf once described as the “mother of English fiction.” Burney’s long and illustrious life straddled the 18th and 19th centuries, but her biographer had to sift through a phlethora of rumour and gossip—some of it engendered by Burney herself—in order to present a faithful portrait. Janet Todd in Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life similarly dispensed with myth when she disregarded the heroine worship that had surfaced in hindsight for the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and dispassionately conveyed a woman who was far from perfect. Samuel Pepys by Stephen Coote was said to be the first life portrait of the famous Restoration diarist in a generation and depicted Pepys’s relationship with his contemporaries, including architect Christopher Wren.

A more unusual offering was Peter Ackroyd’s remarkable London: A Biography; the author explained that the city was for him a “living organism” and thus not a subject of mere history or geography. Among the literary figures who died were Dame Barbara Cartland, the best-selling author of popular romantic fiction, and Penelope Fitzgerald, a novelist of quiet incisiveness who in 1999 had won a PEN award for lifetime achievement. Siobhan Dowd United States. In 2000 it was the year of the great hype about the electronic book, the e-book, or whatever other catchy phrases Internet technologists and their publisher partners used to refer to work that appeared on the Internet rather than in a book-bound format. In addition, such genres as fiction, poetry, and nonfiction became known as electronic “content.” It was the year that novelist Stephen King pulled an old manuscript out of his reject drawer, offered it as a serial on the Internet for a dollar or two per chapter, and drew thousands of subscribers. It was also a year in which some of the finest novelists went on writing well and publishing in the traditional fashion.

Philip Roth, for example, brought out The Human Stain—the third volume in his contemporary American trilogy, a bruising, bawdy, and finally rather magisterial novel about identity and race, freedom of thought, and sexual repression—in which his by-now-ubiquitous narrator Nathan Zuckerman tells a story as powerful as anything Roth had ever told. John Updike worked at no less a level of accomplishment, turning out two works of fiction in a year—the ingenious Gertrude and Claudius, a moving retelling of the Hamlet story from the point of view of the troubled Dane’s parents, and the story collection Licks of Love, in which Updike treated the American readership to a novella-length coda about the late Rabbit Angstrom (the protagonist in his tetralogy) and his heirs. Other masters produced new work, some of it flawed, such as Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s fictional version of the life of teacher and philosopher Allan Bloom; Evan S. Connell’s bloodstained pseudochronicle of the Crusades, Deus Lo Volt!; and E.L. Doctorow’s avowedly modernist but not entirely successful novel City of God.

Joyce Carol Oates’s version of the Marilyn Monroe story, a 700-plus-page novel called Blonde, also received mixed reviews. Herbert Gold’s newest San Francisco novel, Daughter Mine, reprised themes of family and paternity and showcased the veteran writer’s skill, in his own seriocomic way. In his novel The Married Man, Edmund White returned to his by-now-familiar material of love and death among the American and European homosexual middle class. Family played a central role in a number of effective works of fiction by younger writers. In Jayne Anne Phillips’s moving MotherKind, a married woman and mother cares for her dying female parent. In What Remains, Nicholas Delbanco turned a fictional memoir into a moving story of trans-Atlantic crosscurrents in a Jewish family based in London. Susan Richards Shreve deployed dark comedy in Plum & Jaggers, in which a group of children, orphaned after a terrorist bombing, turn to theatre for therapy. Though not tragic, a rather bittersweet tone was heard both in Charles Baxter’s novel, The Feast of Love, set in Ann Arbor, Mich., and in Cornelia Nixon’s stories, set mainly in Chicago, that made up the novel Angels Go Naked.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon’s wonderfully entertaining third novel, recounted the education of a couple of wonder boys in the burgeoning comic-book industry during the early 1940s. A number of other novels had historical themes. In The Heartsong of Charging Elk, James Welch took an obscure historical incident—that of a Sioux warrior who finds himself marooned in Marseille while traveling in France with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show—and turned it into a story with great cumulative power. Josephine Humphreys turned to life among the mixed-blood Native Americans of North Carolina during the Civil War to create a lovely historical texture in the narrative voice of Nowhere Else on Earth. In Harry Gold, Millicent Dillon elaborated on the private life of one of the famous spies for the Soviet Union in the 1950s. In addition to the Updike stories, several fine story collections worth noticing appeared, among them Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World and Alice Elliot Dark’s In the Gloaming. Russell Banks weighed in with his collected stories in The Angel on the Roof.

The most promising first volume of stories, Sam the Cat and Other Stories, came from Matthew Klam; many of his stories had first appeared in The New Yorker magazine. It was also an interesting year for first novels. Veteran story writer Molly Giles debuted as a novelist with her biting, ironic fiction in Iron Shoes, the story of a late-blooming California librarian who is both tightly bound to and at odds with her eccentric, ailing mother. Kate Wheeler, a onetime PEN/Faulkner nominee for her first collection of stories, signed in with an impressive first novel, When Mountains Walked, set in contemporary Peru. Porter Shreve carried on the literary efforts of his family into the second generation when he came out with his well-received first book, The Obituary Writer, in which a young staff writer in search of a place in the world of journalism stumbles on some troubling news.

Lucinda Rosenfeld’s What She Saw in Roger Mancuso, Günter Hopstock, Jason Barry Gold, Spitty Clark, Jack Geezo, Humphrey Fung, Claude Duvet, Bruce Bledstone, Kevin McFeeley, Arnold Allen, Pablo Miles, Anonymous 1–4, Nobody 5–8, Neil Schmertz, and Bo Pierce—the quirky, erotic, and ultimately quite charming novel about a New Jersey girl’s entry into the world of love, sex, and work—met with mostly favourable reviews. The most successful experiment of the year was Los Angeles writer Mark Z. Danielewski’s horror novel, House of Leaves. Many of the most interesting and appealing works of nonfiction came in the form of autobiography, memoir, and biography. Among the memoirs, magazine editor Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was the most highly publicized and, for the most part, extremely well received. Leap, an unconventional prose meditation on life and art, came from Terry Tempest Williams. A Life in the Twentieth Century by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., was probably the most interesting of mainstream work.

Lauren Slater’s Lying had a certain subversive appeal on the subject of looking back on one’s life. Doris Grumbach took a long view of her literary past in The Pleasure of Their Company, and novelist Larry Woiwode signed in with the first volume of his memoir, What I Think I Did, the title of which was a play on the title of his first novel, What I’m Going to Do, I Think (1969). King, fresh from a roadside accident in which he nearly lost his life, combined autobiography and his thoughts on the making of fiction in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Poet Maxine Kumin reported about her near-fatal horseback-riding accident in Inside the Halo and Beyond. The late Sylvia Plath was represented by The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil. Prizewinning poet C.K. Williams told of family bitterness in his memoir, Misgivings. In Miles and Me, poet Quincy Troupe looked back on his encounters with great jazz musician Miles Davis.

Among literary biographies, James Atlas’s Bellow was first among equals, at least as far as the interest it stirred. A mix of straightforward biography and shorthand literary criticism, the book was a warts-and-all account of the life and work of Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize-winning octogenarian. In light of some of the gossip included about Bellow’s sex life and marital problems, Bellow probably wished that he had never given his consent to the project. Since most of the subjects of David Laskin’s Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals were dead, they could not feel the uneasiness that Bellow had to be suffering. The New Yorker’s former editor Frances Kiernan released Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy, a gathering of mostly oral testimony on the life of the once enormously popular novelist. Journalist Michael Herr was appreciative and affectionate toward Stanley Kubrick in Kubrick, his short tribute to the recently deceased motion picture director. Among other literary memorabilia, Bonnie Kime Scott edited the Selected Letters of Rebecca West, and John F. Callahan and Albert Murray edited Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray.

Historian David Levering Lewis published W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963, the second installment of the biography; Lewis had won an array of prizes for the first volume. One of the best-known American socialist organizers in the second half of the 20th century served as the subject of Maurice Isserman’s The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century was Christine Stansell’s interesting subject. Alice Kaplan produced The Collaborator: The Trial & Execution of Robert Brasillach. It was a grand year for poetry; both the outgoing and incoming U.S. poet laureates brought out new books. Robert Pinsky published Jersey Rain: “It spends itself regardless into the ocean./ It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright:/ Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction,/ The chilly liquefaction of day to night,// The Jersey rain, my rain soaks all as one . . .

,” and Stanley Kunitz released The Collected Poems: “Summer is late, my heart,/ Words plucked out of the air/ some forty years ago/ when I was wild with love/ and torn almost in two/ scatter like leaves this night/ of whistling wind and rain./ It is my heart that’s late,/ it is my song that’s flown. . . .” C.K. Williams published Repair (1999), John Ashbery brought out Your Name Here, Yusef Komunyakaa offered Talking Dirty to the Gods, and Jay Wright weighed in with Transfigurations, his collected poems.

Among other collections were Stanley Plumly’s Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New & Selected Poems, 1970–2000 and August Kleinzahler’s Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems, 1975–1990: “Drifting, drifting, a single gull between sky and earth,/ He said of himself, alone at night on the Yangtze,/ Bent grasses and gentle wind./ And asked where his name was/ Among the poets./ No answer, moon’s disk on the great river.” Also emerging on the scene were Charles Wright’s Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems and two volumes by Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Supernatural Love: Poems 1976–1992 and The Throne of Labdacus. Several volumes on Native American themes appeared: William Jay Smith’s The Cherokee Lottery, Sherman Alexie’s One Stick Song, and Adrian C. Louis’s Ancient Acid Flashes Back.

A large group of accomplished lyric poets brought out new volumes, including Richard Tillinghast (Six Mile Mountain), Lawrence Raab (The Probable World), MacArthur fellowship winner Anne Carson (Men in the Off Hours), Michael Collier (The Ledge), and Lloyd Schwartz (Cairo Traffic). The literary world mourned the loss of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who died in December. (See Obituaries.) It was a fecund year for unorthodox literary criticism. Novelist Nicholas Delbanco included a novella on themes out of Ernest Hemingway’s life among the essays in his collection, The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life. Joan Acocella created an expanded version in book form of her provocative essay for The New Yorker in Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. In For Rabbit, with Love and Squalor, novelist Anne Roiphe featured essays on male characters in contemporary American literature, such as Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom and Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe, with whom she became enamoured, she explained, as she read.

Harold Bloom focused on How to Read and Why, and Kumin was reflective in Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry. In Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture, Robert Alter looked to the Bible as a template for modern literature. David Rosenberg also looked to Hebraic texts as his focus in Dreams of Being Eaten Alive: The Literary Core of the Kabbalah. Cynthia Ozick took a temperately Old Testament tone in Quarrel & Quandary, a collection of her recent critical essays. Experimental writer Carole Maso encouraged readers and writers to Break Every Rule. A bit more conventional was Updike: America’s Man of Letters, William H. Pritchard’s intelligent critical assessment of John Updike, one of the deans of contemporary literature. Art critic Arthur C. Danto collected his pieces from The Nation magazine in The Madonna of the Future. Eric Bentley’s collection What Is Theatre? (2nd edition) gathered criticism and reviews from 1944 to 1967. Poet Mark Strand joined in with The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention.

Michigan poet Thomas Lynch, a mortician by profession, wrote about art and life in Bodies in Motion and at Rest. Short-story writer Jhumpa Lahiri captured two awards, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction. C.K. Williams won the Pulitzer for poetry. Embracing Defeat (1999) by John W. Dower, a study of Japan in the aftermath of World War II, took the general nonfiction Pulitzer. Ha Jin (see Biographies) won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story went to Ann Beattie and Nathan Englander. Alan Cheuse Canada Ghosts of many kinds enlivened the fictional offerings of 2000. In Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, it is one of the many victims of Sri Lanka’s interminable guerrilla war whom Anil, a forensic anthropologist, seeks to rescue from anonymity. In Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, the younger sister, a long-ago suicide, bedevils the elder as the latter spins interlocking anecdotes of deceit and betrayal arising from their love for the same man.

In Susan Musgrave’s Cargo of Orchids, a blackly funny and bleakly honest account of one woman’s sojourn to death row, the haunting is by the ghost of what might have been. Spirits of mythic proportions inform Eden Robinson’s first novel, Monkey Beach, about a young native woman grappling with the death of her beloved brother amid the shifting mists of the British Columbia coast. In Steven Heighton’s The Shadow Boxer, the ghosts of the doomed freighter Edmund Fitzgerald serve as companions to a young man seeking to find his own way in a deserted lighthouse on the shore of Lake Superior. The presence hovering over Elizabeth Hay’s A Student of Weather is still alive, but no less potent; in another tale of sibling betrayal, two sisters compete for the same sweet fellow. Flight and denial were also common themes. In Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement, a young woman flees into exile to avoid discovering the outcome of a duel fought over her. In Burridge Unbound by Alan Cumyn, a survivor of terrorism returns to the place of his incarceration, and Fred Stenson’s The Trade encompasses a host of fugitives—from the law, civilization, or themselves—forced to face the cold realities of the northern fur trade.

Anita Rau Badami dealt with several levels of denial in The Hero’s Walk, in which an old man, suddenly responsible for his young granddaughter, must face a future foreign to him, his family, and his caste. Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards presented the consequences of a pact with God as not entirely unlike those arising from a pact with the devil. Short fiction naturally spawned a number of diverse works. In Carol Shields’s Dressing Up for the Carnival, a high-class midway was full of familiar yet unique people. Luck in all of its manifestations—good, bad, and indifferent—attends an engagingly eclectic assortment of individuals in the late Matt Cohen’s Getting Lucky. In Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind, the cultures of the coasts of Canada were revealed through the idiosyncratic excesses of their inhabitants. Terence Young’s Rhymes with Useless was a mixed bag of ordinary families coping in their separate ways with an extraordinary world. The first collection by Madeline Sonik, Drying the Bones, featured a series of investigations into and beyond the obvious.

Though Al Purdy (see Obituaries), one of Canada’s major poets, died in April, his voice lives on in the posthumously published Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems. Another death, that of Patrick Lane’s mother, informed his latest collection, The Bare Plum of Winter Rain. The death of Charles Lillard, poet and husband, was mourned in Rhonda Batchelor’s Weather Report. Winona Baker expressed the essence of life’s transient seasons through haiku in Even a Stone Breathes. Although death was not ignored, a lighter note was struck in bill bissett’s b leev abul char ak trs. In Ruin & Beauty: New and Selected Poems, Patricia Young explored the necessary contradictions at the heart of life, a concept that also animated A Pair of Scissors, Sharon Thesen’s examination of how opposites work against each other to create something new. For Don McKay in Another Gravity, it was the contrariness of nature and the ambivalence of human nature that formed the dramas of people’s lives. George Bowering, in His Life: A Poem, spins his timeless meditations on the rotations of solstice and equinox.

What the Small Day Cannot Hold: Collected Poems 1970–1985 summed up Musgrave’s mordant take on life in the late 20th century. Elizabeth Rhett Woods Other Literature in English In addition to hosting the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, Australia laid claim to English-language writers who accomplished literary feats of Olympic proportion during the year. Leading the way was poet and novelist David Malouf, who released Dream Stuff, a collection of short stories, before taking home the gold twice by winning both the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Lannan Prize for fiction. Close behind were Thea Astley, who garnered the Miles Franklin Award for the fourth time (this time for her novel Drylands [1999]), and Lily Brett, whose novel Too Many Men (1999) received the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. Other highlights included works by such well-established authors as Colleen McCullough (Morgan’s Run), Frank Moorhouse (Dark Palace), and poet Les Murray (Conscious and Verbal [1999]), as well as by newcomer Ben Rice with his first novel, Pobby and Dingan.

In nearby New Zealand, Kapka Kassabova’s novel Reconnaissance (1999) won the regional Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book, while veteran authors C.K. Stead (Talking About O’Dwyer [1999]) and Fleur Adcock (Poems: 1960–2000) had important new books as well. Michael King published Wrestling with the Angel, his biography on the remarkable life of novelist Janet Frame. Africa offered its usual fare of outstanding works in English, including Chinua Achebe’s Home and Exile, in which he provided a personal account of his intellectual and writing life; it was the Nigerian’s first book in 13 years. Achebe was widely considered the patriarch of the modern African novel. Poet, fiction writer, and critic Tanure Ojaide brought out a selection of poems spanning more than three decades, Invoking the Warrior Spirit (1998), in which the eponymous warrior is the poet himself at battle within his troubled Nigeria.

Countryman Funso Aiyejina received the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in Africa for his collection The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories (1999), and South African J.M. Coetzee continued his commercial and critical success by winning the top Commonwealth Writers Prize for 2000 for Disgrace (1999). Master storyteller André Brink released The Rights of Desire, a fictional meditation on aging and love, loneliness and fulfillment, guilt and innocence, and loss. Also noteworthy was the publication of Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (1999) by the much-heralded Somalian exiled writer Nuruddin Farah, along with outstanding fiction debuts from Ugandan-born Moses Isegawa (Abyssinian Chronicles) and South African-born Sindiwe Magona (Mother to Mother [1998]), both of whom also lived in exile. Drawing on his own experience of exile in Europe and Africa and going home to an emerging democracy still trying to define itself, Mandla Langa of South Africa offered The Memory of Stones, his most ambitious work to date.

The memory of Ken Saro-Wiwa of Nigeria was kept alive with the publication of the critical anthology Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa—Literature, Politics, and Dissent, edited by Onookome Okome. Dambudzo Marechera of Zimbabwe was remembered with the posthumous release of his poetry collection Cemetery of Mind. Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017 | Book Trust Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017 Latest update 'BookTrust no longer runs the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction ' The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction will now be managed by the Society of Authors The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction was set up to celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in writing by women throughout the world. Known from 1996 to 2012 as the Orange Prize for Fiction and in 2013 as the Women's Prize for Fiction, it is the UK's most prestigious annual book award for fiction written by a woman and also provides a range of educational, literacy or research initiatives to support reading and writing.

The Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction is awarded annually for the best full novel of the year written by a woman and published in the UK. Any woman writing in English - whatever her nationality, country of residence, age or subject matter - is eligible. The winner receives a cheque for £30,000 and a limited edition bronze figurine known as a 'Bessie', created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven. The 2015 winner, awarded on 3 June at the Royal Festival Hall, London, was Ali Smith for her novel How to be Both (Hamish Hamilton). The full list of previous winners are: Ali Smith for How to be Both (2015); Eimear McBride for A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2014); A.M.

Homes for May We Be Forgiven (2013); Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles (2012); Téa Obreht for The Tiger's Wife (2011); Barbara Kingsolver for The Lacuna (2010); Marilynne Robinson for Home (2009); Rose Tremain for The Road Home (2008); Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Half of a Yellow Sun (2007); Zadie Smith for On Beauty (2006); Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005); Andrea Levy for Small Island (2004); Valerie Martin for Property (2003); Ann Patchett for Bel Canto (2002); Kate Grenville for The Idea of Perfection (2001); Linda Grant for When I Lived in Modern Times (2000); Suzanne Berne for A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999); Carol Shields for Larry's Party (1998); Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces (1997); and Helen Dunmore for A Spell of Winter (1996).

Question: The Guardian Fiction Prize was replaced in 1999 by the Guardian First Book award. Whose novel White Teeth was the second winner?
Answer: ZADIE SMITH